GamesIndustry International - Fez, Fish and The Problem with Patching.Fez has grossed over a million dollars, and even after Microsoft has taken a lump of that, it would be outright negligent and irresponsible of Fish not to have money left over to cover an unforeseen problem like a reissued patch. Catch-22. If you're able to complain about it, you're also able to pay for it, and your users are quite entitled to excoriate you for using them as hostages in a debate with Microsoft which is of no real relevance to them.

"I don't care how indie you are, or how free and loose your ideas of commerce and creativity may be - once you've taken a million bucks from consumers, professionalism isn't optional" Equally, though, one can have sympathy with Microsoft. The company gives one patch for free, and charges for subsequent patches - not because it's greedy and avaricious (it does lots of other things for those reasons, of course), but because it doesn't want to see XBLA games being released buggy or incomplete and patched repeatedly. The Xbox is a console, and players expect not to be confronted with the kind of endless match of bugs and patches which so often afflict PC games. Microsoft has a duty to its consumers to try to enforce that, and ultimately, Fish bears responsibility for creating a patch with such a serious bug in it.

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Silicon Avatar wrote on Jul 21, 2012, 17:28:Eh... I dunno. If you only get 1 shot at a patch and you mess it up knowing that it is going to cost you to fix it you'd think that patch would be bullet-proof.

It is not like they have to test against a million different pieces of hardware like you do on PC.

I'm confused as to why the testing process didn't catch the bug in the first place though. Isn't that what they are paid to do? Seems like the error is mutual and he should get to put his patch back up free.

1- Modern games are super complex, even if they're not AAA titles. It's a gameplay bug, not a hardware related crash. It's not reasonable to think a game can be completely bug free.

2- MS Certification, AFAIK, is only to make sure your patch doesn't melt your console or cause crashes. Again, it's a gameplay bug, and there's certainly no way MS patch certification guys could check for that.